Two hawks frozen in flight, a pair of figures shoving a ball uphill, and a walk-in red apple with seats inside are all slated for the big parks flanking the Excelsior. According to the program's own public funding tracker, only one of the three currently has the money to get built.

The sculptures belong to Big Art Loop, a donor-funded effort to string up to 100 temporary large-scale artworks along a 34-mile route across San Francisco. Three are earmarked for the Excelsior's doorstep — two at John McLaren Park, one at Balboa Park. Unlike the marquee pieces downtown, these sit on a public crowdfunding board, each attached to a dollar goal that must be met before fabrication or shipping begins. As of this week, two of the three are still labeled "seeking funding."

The Excelsior is in line for the kind of oversized public sculpture that already draws crowds downtown and in Golden Gate Park. Whether the neighborhood actually gets it is, at the moment, a math problem.

The three planned works are catalogued on the site of Big Art Loop (external source, opens in a new tab), an initiative launched in 2025 and seeded by the Sijbrandij Foundation. Production is handled by the art company Building 180, working with San Francisco Recreation and Parks and the Arts Commission; the effort has put more than $2 million into the trail in its first year, Rec and Parks (external source, opens in a new tab) says.

Each neighborhood piece has a hook. Nicki Adani's Bird's Eye View places two hawks aloft at McLaren Park's Glen Eagles overlook, their feathers throwing shadow-text that shifts with the daylight. George Mubanga, a Zambian sculptor who works in recycled material, contributes The Pushers — two figures straining a heavy ball up the McLaren Park overlook, an image of stubborn effort. And Montréal artist Nicolas Synnott's Big Apple, bound for Balboa Park, is a giant red apple you can walk into and sit down inside.

Sarah Madland, who runs Rec and Parks as general manager, has credited earlier installations with adding, as she put it, "a surprise moment of humor and personality" to heavily trafficked spots.

The news is in the ledger. Big Art Loop keeps a live donation board — headlined as a push to fund the next 17 sculptures — that pairs every pending piece with a full budget covering the artist's fee, engineering, installation and long-term care. Among the Excelsior-area three, only Bird's Eye View, at $83,000, currently reads as funded. The Pushers ($76,675) and Big Apple ($94,824) are both flagged seeking funding — leaving roughly $171,000 in donations between the neighborhood and two of its three promised works.

That board also unsettles the picture painted when Mission Local's Excelsior Buzz column (external source, opens in a new tab) first flagged the pieces on Aug. 14. The column reported The Pushers as already funded and targeted for a December 2026 install, slowed chiefly by the logistics of shipping the work from Zambia, per Meredith Winner, a Big Art Loop co-founding partner and COO of Building 180. Days later, the program's own tracker no longer lists that piece as paid for — a sign that a crowdfunded art trail can slide backward as easily as forward.

That volatility is baked into the model. Leaning on donors instead of a fixed civic arts budget lets the Loop expand quickly across the map, but it also means a given neighborhood's fate rides on which sculptures happen to attract a patron. The waterfront went first: the Portside stretch (external source, opens in a new tab) running from Fisherman's Wharf toward Hunters Point filled in early. The Excelsior's works sit further down the list.

City Hall has still lined up behind it. Mayor Daniel Lurie, in an endorsement carried on the program's website, casts the trail as a way to enliven public space and lift the local economy. Sarah Madland, who runs Rec and Parks as general manager, has credited earlier installations with adding, as she put it, "a surprise moment of humor and personality" to heavily trafficked spots.

Big Art Loop counts 25 sculptures up citywide and expects roughly 15 more by year's end, with the two unfunded Excelsior pieces penciled in for early 2027 should the money arrive. Until then, the hawks and the apple exist as renderings beside a running tally — public art still waiting to be paid for.